Discourse analysis

Activity 2 Read the note, consider that it is pinned on a professor’s door:
Sorry I missed you. I am in my other office. Back in an hour.
What do you think who is addressee?
What time was the note written?
Where is the location of the other office?

• 
  Discuss with your partner and share your guessing with the whole class. Speak about why it was difficult to interpret.
  

According to Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners ‘It is clear that on their own many sentences and utterances hard to interpret. Take this example
That’s his.
As a sentence it is grammatically well formed but you can’t make much sense of it without reference either to what preceded it, or to relevant features of the immediate context (or both) on their own the pronoun that and his lack referents: That what? His what?
As it happens, the sentence that immediately precedes That’s his (in the text from which the text is taken) doesn’t help us much either

Lesson 4 Cohesive devices. References

In the previous lesson we discuss what is cohesion. Let’s repeat.
cohesive resources were organized as:
• reference
• ellipsis
• substitution
• conjunction
• lexical cohesion.
We have noted the way that elements in a text refer to other elements (their referents) both inside and outside the text and how this cross-referencing serves to bind the text together, connecting sentences with other sentences and connecting the text to its context. Reference is such an important aspect of cohesion - and one that causes trouble to learners. Reference, as we have seen, is commonly achieved through the use of pronouns (he, we, it, this and that, these and those) 'and articles. We'll look at each of these in turn.
We have seen how pronouns refer back to previously mentioned referents. Here's another example, from a Ukrainian folk tale.
One day a dog left his home and went out into the wide world to get a job. He worked long and hard and finally took his wages and bought a lovely new pair of boots...
The pronoun he and the possessive determiner his have back-reference to the dog. Back-reference is technically called anaphoric reference. The words he and his act like little index fingers, directing us back in the text to these first mentions. (In actual fact, the pronouns are directing our attention not at something back in the text, but at a concept that has been introduced into our evolving mental construction of the narrative as a result of our reading of the text. This mental construction is called a schema.
“ Reference is an act by which a speaker (or writer) uses language to enable a listener (or
reader) to identify something. The idea of reference is that of having to look for the full
meaning somewhere else. We can look for the information elsewhere in the text
(anaphoric or cataphoric reference) or outside the text (exophoric reference).”